In the early 1980s a newly emerging, unknown disease was causing panic. There was no viable treatment, vaccine or cure. Nobody could fight it.
Then in 1987, a young Argentine-Canadian physician who had specialized in respiratory diseases, was put in charge of St. Paul’s Hospital/UBC’s AIDS Research Program and the Infectious Disease Clinic. At the time, there were many – mostly young – men being admitted to the hospital who were suffering from a lethal form of pneumonia known as PCP (pneumocystis pneumonia) and the young physician started asking questions.
Those questions changed the course of history.
That inquisitive physician: Dr. Julio Montaner, UBC faculty member and pioneering HIV researcher, who went on to lead the innovation of a highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). This combination therapy effectively stopped HIV’s disease progression to AIDS.
Montaner has since led the world out of the dark days of AIDS with this life-saving antiretroviral therapy, as well as a forward-thinking treatment strategy.
If implemented worldwide, the made-in-BC medical application – Treatment as Prevention¨ (TasP¨) – has the potential to stop a global epidemic in its tracks.